Now that we have taken a look at the iMovie landscape, let’s discuss a few panels in more detail. The Event Library is the place where all your videos are listed, initially organized by storage location.

You will find the Event Library at the lower left of the workspace. By default, your computer hard drive is listed along with any external drives that are attached. As you would expect, under each of these sections are listed all the video on that drive. Also by default, the video is further divided into sections by year. Within each yearly section you will find individual videos by name.

In the section containing videos on your computer, you have an iPhoto Videos icon which will display all the photos in iPhotos. This is a nice feature because you don’t need to open iPhoto. Another useful option is the Last Import section that displays the most recently imported videos.

The Event Library is a newer feature in iMovie and can be a bit confusing at first, at least it was for me. I begin most of my art or animation projects by creating a special folder on my desktop. In this folder, I keep all the files, including resource files such as video. As you would expect, if I have more than one project that uses the same video, I will have duplicate copies of these common videos. Sometimes that may be necessary if you are making specific changes for each project and want to keep each version of the edited video stored with the project.

However, depending on the number of projects with duplicate videos, this does tend to take up a lot of disk space. iMovie’s answer to this problem is to store only one copy of the video on your computer or external hard drive and list them in the Event Library panel, which then “points” to these original videos or filmstrips. As you work on a project, iMovie keeps track of the changes that you have made to the original video for that project but doesn’t really do anything to the original video. Therefore, if you have more than one project using the same video, iMovie stores the specific changes for each project in the iMovie project file at the following location.

user - Movies - iMovie Projects

The Event Library is also the place for organizing your videos. By default, iMovie organizes your footage by “Events” and an event can be anything you wish. However, iMovie also has a Keyword system for tagging video clips. Of course, this system isn’t very useful without a search feature. When you click on the Search icon at the bottom of the Event Library, the Filter by Keyword panel will open.